The Consortium of National Law Universities’ executive committee (EC), set up in 2014, has decided to lobby the BCI to allow full-time law teachers to also practise law.
If this were allowed, the consortium’s EC, which consists of vice chancellors (VCs) of all national law schools and is currently chaired by Nalsar Hyderabad VC Prof Faizan Mustafa, said that law teachers should primarily act pro bono in worthy and important human-rights- and constitution-type cases.
But, if law teachers were to make money in any future legal practice, 60% of teachers’ earned fees should go to their employee university, according to the proposal.
While this could open up an interesting new revenue source for cash-strapped NLUs, we wonder if a more entrepreneurial NLU could consider competing with law firms under the model…
Probably not, though. In a sensible sop to appease any members of the legal profession who might fear an influx from the ivory towers taking away their jobs, as well as students who might complain about their teachers’ absences, the VCs also added that they would not allow any NLU teacher from appearing in court more than three times per month and to spend more than 15 hours a week on their hypothetical legal practice.
In other jurisdictions, particularly in the US, top academics regularly appear in the courts or draft legal opinions for law firms, and can command high fees. In India, there have only been a few academics who have been active in the field.
Update 21:32: We have learnt that the consortium’s move follows Prof Shamnad Basheer having circulated a petition to law school vice chancellors and professors on 19 February. The Bok visiting professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania and honorary chair professor at Nirma University was seeking their support for his petition to the BCI to open up litigation to academics (see copy of petition below). His email stated:
the nature of law teaching is such that there is no conflict between the teaching of law and the practice of it. In fact, one aids the other! We also point to the paradox of permitting practising lawyers to teach in law schools (upto 21 hours a week!) whilst at the same time, preventing law teachers from even practising a single hour in court!
This petition already has the support of renowned academic leaders in our space including Prof Madhav Menon, Prof Faizan Mustafa, Prof Venkat Rao etc. And we are thankful to them for lending their name to the cause.
First things first
For NLU teachers to get there may be an uphill struggle though, requiring reforming the existing rules.
Rule 49 of the Bar Council of India (BCI) Rules currently bans full-time salaried employees, such as law professors, from practising law.
The EC unanimously voted at its last meeting on 19 February 2019 to push for amendment of those rules.
“We are going to write to the BCI also and create some sort of lobbying,” Mustafa explained about the process they would follow. “And, if it doesn’t happen, then go to the court [to argue] that the inclusion of law teachers with any other employee is arbitrary. We [law teachers] are different from other employees.”
The consortium argued in a joint statement: “Not allowing law teachers to practise in the courts of law is harming the legal system as lawyers and judges […] can contribute meaningfully to the legal system.”
“Law teachers are a separate class in themselves and should not be treated like any other salaried employee,” it added, emphasising that the country “badly needs litigation lawyers and there is a need to bridge the gap between law in books and law in action”.
The move to give law teachers more practical litigation experience, would also encourage and attract “bright students of NLUs to take up litigation as their career”, according to the statement (NLU students’ predilection for corporate jobs has been bemoaned by VCs since Prof Madhava Menon, though equally celebrated by many NLU students who do love the lucre).
Offering a clinical legal education course would also be mandatory for any practising teachers, the EC proposed.
Idealistically, the “executive committee also expressed the hope that most of the cases taken up by law teachers would ideally involve violation of human rights / seek overruling of wrong decisions by the courts / interpretation of Constitution”:
It is expected that these teachers would appear pro-bono. However, if fee is charged, it would be shared between the concerned University and the Law Teacher in the ratio of 60:40.
Mustafa said that there had been a case in the Delhi high court in the 70s or 80s that held law teachers were not allowed to practice, so the VCs would seek to have that overturned. He said that the recent rejection by the Supreme Court of the petition seeking ban on politicians appearing in court, could be helpful.
“In any case, it would be fundamentally pro bono and human rights and constitutional interpretation and appeal of wrong decisions: that should be open to law teachers,” Mustafa added.
[documentcloudShamnad Basheer petition to permit academics to practice law
Comments
1. Low salary and lack of opportunities to be in touch with practice keeps out NLU talent from law teaching and forces them to join firms and litigation. Now, quite a few NLU grads will be encouraged to shift to academia and practise law part-time. The quality of faculty (which is woeful) will improve. This especially opens up the possibility of clinical, skills-based courses being introduced, like in the US.
2. Like in the US, law firms can now involve profs and do pro bono work with them, with students working as RAs and researching on Westlaw and Lexis (which not all firms in India subscribe to). This is a win win situation for everyone.
3. Also, some professors who quit NLUs and joined Jindal due to higher pay may now return to NLUs, as an NLU salary + practice earnings will be enough for them. These people otherwise do not enjoy teaching at Jindal due to poor student quality.
I have not come across a single person so far who thinks that JGLS students are any better or worse off than those in a NLU and many of them are NLU Alums (especially Top 3 with most being from NUJS).
There are many reasons for which people join JGLS apart from salary. The woeful admin at NLUs along with its bureaucracy probably doesn't help either. Stop dragging our names for no reason and look inside as to why NLUs are not able to attract their own alumni, not everyone is driven by money, more so in academia. Peace.
May be we will have more people from practice willing to teach - but then already that is the case with many lawyers happy to do part-time teaching. The problem is that the mediocre, insecure guys in these NLUs does not want practitioners to come and teach (for obvious reasons).
I also feel that it is an assumption that people from NLUs left for Jindal only because of money. Many of them left because NLUs were bad places to work with mediocre colleagues. Kian, you could actually do some work on employee satisfaction (for teachers) at NLUs.
There are 5 other teachers who have done their postgraduate studies at NALSAR, namely Sourabh Bharti (LLM 2009), Jagteshwar Singh Sohi (LLM 2013) and Ashwini Kumar Pendyala (LLM 2013) who are in permanent positions while Varun Malik (LLM 2016) and Alok Verma (LLM 2016) are presently in contractual positions.
Apart from these chaps, we have Prerna Dhoop and Utkarsh Leo who have done their undergraduate degrees from KIIT Law School (2013 batch) and Rajesh Kapoor who had earlier studied at Symbiosis Pune (1997-2002). All three have masters' degrees from foreign universities.
I have taken courses with 10 out of the 12 people named above and they are all quite decent with classroom delivery and supervision of term papers. We also have some very good people for the social sciences (Prof. Agni Kumar, Prof. T. Kannan and recent hires such as Dr. Manohar Reddy and Dr. Murali Karanam) but there are some under-performing teachers from the older group.
https://www.legallyindia.com/lawfirms/first-nls-grad-takes-silk-white-case-partner-jessup-legend-dipen-sabharwal-becomes-elite-senior-queen-s-counsel-in-uk-20190111-9829#comment-124388
This is not meant to establish any superiority of NUJS faculty quality over others. Being an NLU alumna does not make you a good teacher necessarily. I think overall the faculty quality and research environment at NLUD would probably be the best of all NLUs at present, with NALSAR probably being second. NLSIU can quickly regain grounds lost under a new good VC if they actually recruit again proactively.
1. Some of the star faculty members actually do very little teaching. They either teach electives or short courses to small groups, or take leave to do research. Some get forced into admin positions by the management, which thinks the best way to use bright faculty is to make them do routine paperwork.
2. Furthermore, even if a good prof is available to teach compulsory courses full time, the large batch strength of Jindal means they can only teach a fraction of the students. Thus, Section A gets a brilliant professor for a subject and students get motivated to make their careers in the field, while Sections B, C and D get a bad professor and end up disliking the subject. Another problem is that there are too many people working on public law and human rights. Not enough good profs for commercially relevant subjects.
3. Then, it does not help that the meritorious students get drowned out by indisciplined brats because of the huge batch sizes. Both the meritorious students and the meritorious faculty get demotivated.
4. It is said that the large batch sizes are because the other schools at Jindal (policy, business, lib arts etc) are white elephants causing huge losses to the university, so the law school must cover their losses.
5. Bottomline: Jindal needs to reduce the batch sizes to 80-100 like the NLUs, retain the top 30% of faculty, reduce the human rights bias, and work out an arrangement where the research priorities of professors can be balanced with teaching. Also, the law school cannot keep subsidising the other loss-making schools. Shut them down!
Kian, it will be good if you can do a story on these issues.
1. Why did you not name NLUD as a party when you filed your CLAT PIL? Why are you knowingly allowing them to get away from CLAT?
2. Why are you not filing a PIL on National Importance Status for NLUs?
3. Why are you tweeting against PM Modi all the time? What is the need to be so political? Why are you not tweeting about the misdeeds of Congress?
2. Because I had heard that you were contemplating to file one and felt my abilities and motivation get dwarfed by yours. Why, did you chicken out of it at the last moment?
3. Because Trump has inspired me to tweet more and listen less. Otherwise, I have no beef with Modiji. Which may seem a moo point to you.
Who is stopping you from lobbying and approaching govt/courts from national status to nlu?
Why don't you praise modi ji? Why don't you praise the farce of higher education funding by successive governments?